First school
The first school was conducted in a military tent in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. By 1850, schools were being established throughout the area. The first public school law, passed by the territorial legislature in 1851, provided for the establishment of one or more schools in every town to be supported by local taxes. The first free public school opened in American Fork in 1866.
First settlement
Fort Buenaventura was established on the Weber River in 1846 by Miles Goodyear, a mountain man, and Captain Welles, a British army officer, at the present site of Ogden. Goodyear set up a trading post to help emigrants and support his Ute wife and two children.
First permanent settlers
In 1847 Brigham Young led the first Mormon pioneers to the Salt Lake Valley, seeking refuge from religious persecution. Many others followed, establishing permanent settlements in various areas of the state. The Utah region belonged to Mexico but became part of the United States after the successful conclusion of the Mexican War in 1848. The pioneers established what they called the state of Deseret in 1849.
First governor
Brigham Young became the first governor of the temporary government in 1949, then territorial governor when Congress established the Utah Territory as part of the Compromise of 1850. When Utah became a state in 1896, Heber M. Wells, Republican, was elected the first governor. A former tax collector and city recorder for Salt Lake City, Wells previously had run unsuccessfully for mayor.
First legislative session
The first state legislative session was authorized for 90 days and produced 60 bills to send to the governor. Many of the bills established the basic organization of state courts and offices, election reform and codified laws. Lawmakers rejected railroad regulations supported by the governor.
First university
The University of Deseret was chartered Feb. 28, 1850, and opened Nov. 11, 1850. Lack of funding caused its closure in 1852, but the school opened again as a commercial college in 1867. In 1900, the university moved from downtown Salt Lake City to the Fort Douglas military reservation, and in 1902, the name was changed to the University of Utah.
First executive mansion
The Beehive House, built between 1852 and 1854, served as the first executive mansion as well as residence for Brigham Young. It was built of adobe and sandstone from City Creek Canyon and earned its name from the beehive on top of the house, signifying industry. The Beehive House was restored in 1960 and is open to the public.
First newspaper
The Deseret News was first published June 13, 1850, with the first copies produced on a small, wrought-iron handpress that had been purchased in the East and brought into the valley by ox team. It yielded two copies per minute. Dr. Willard Richards was the first editor, and the first "newsboy" was his adopted daughter. For eight years, it was the only paper in Utah. On Nov. 21, 1867, the first daily evening edition appeared, and the Deseret News continues to be one of only two pioneer newspapers west of the Missouri River still in production.
First statehouse
Utah's first statehouse was located in Fillmore, the site of the territorial capital. The first wing of the building was completed by Dec. 10, 1855, for the fifth legislative session of the territorial government. Because of lack of development in the area, the next session of the legislature met in Salt Lake City. The wing in Fillmore now houses a state museum and is Utah's oldest government building.
First library
The state's first library was established during the 1850s with books hauled to the state by oxen. The first building in the state to be used only as a library was the Carnegie Free Library (now the Weber County Library), which opened in 1903.
First mansion
The Staines-Jennings Mansion, now known as the Devereaux House, was the first mansion in Salt Lake City. It was constructed in 1857 and was used to entertain such notables as President Ulysses S. Grant.
First telegraph
The first transcontinental telegraph service was established July 23, 1861, when telegraph lines from Washington, D.C., and San Francisco met at Salt Lake City, providing a link between eastern and western sections of the United States. A small crowd witnessed the event at 68 S. Main, asBrigham Young telegraphed assurances that the Utah Territory remained true to the Union. One of the first messages back to Salt Lake City from the East was from President Abraham Lincoln.
First department store
ZCMI, widely known as "America's first department store," was founded in Utah in March 1868 as Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution, a community-owned merchandising organization. Members throughout the region sold a variety of items at the same price they were in Salt Lake City. In 1876 numerous departments were combined in a single building along Main Street, the site of one of the current ZCMI department stores.
First transcontinental railroad
The first transcontinental railroad system in the United States was completed at Promontory on May 10, 1869, when the driving of a golden spike joined the Central Pacific Railroad, which began building eastward from Sacramento, Calif., in 1861, and the Union Pacific Railroad, which started building west from Omaha, Neb., in 1862.
First Pony Express
The Pony Express first arrived in Salt Lake City on April 7, 1860, at 11:45 p.m., four days out of Sacramento, carrying mail to St. Joseph, Mo. The service reduced the amount of time it took news to travel cross-country from three months to about a week. The Pony Express closed Oct. 26, 1861, shortly after the telegraph lines were connected.
First mining
The first formal mining claims in Utah were in the Bingham Canyon area. Many soldiers were experienced prospectors and began searching for gold and silver in the Wasatch and Oquirrh mountains in the 1860s. Mining activity grew rapidly after the transcontinental railroad was completed.
First electricity
Salt Lake City became the fifth city in the world to acquire electricity when it first lighted a portion of Main Street on April 1, 1891, joining London, New York, San Francisco and Cleveland. The lights demonstrated on April 1 were part of a system of three circuits. Four 60-horsepower boilers drove a 150-horsepower buckeye engine that in turn drove three generators that provided power to light 40 lamps each.
First telephone
Three years after Alexander Graham Bell received his first patent, the telephone came to Salt Lake City. On March 1, 1879, A.M. Munser, who had been instrumental in bringing telegraph service to Utah, conversed with L.E. Holden, a "well-known mining magnate of the city," at his downtown office from Holden's residence on South Temple. Cost of hooking up to the system was advertised at $3 a month. It wasn't until 1914 that the final pole of the first transcontinental phone line was erected on the Utah/Nevada border near Wendover, linking both coasts.
First women's vote
Women won the right to vote twice in Utah. In 1870, the territorial legislature granted women the right to vote, making Utah the second territory to extend the vote to women. (Wyoming was the first, in 1869. The women's vote was revoked by Congress in 1887 as part of the national effort to eliminate polygamy. It was restored in 1895, when the right of women to vote was written into Utah's constitution.
First women elected
The 1896 election became a historic affair when three women were elected to the state's second legislature, including a female senator who was not only the first in Utah but also first in the country. Martha Hughes Cannon, a physician who worked as a typesetter for the Deseret Evening News to earn money for her education, defeated her husband in her election to the Utah Senate. Eurithe K. LaBarthe of Salt Lake City served as chairman of the House Education Committee, and Sarah Elizabeth Nelson Anderson, one of the most prominent and popular women of Ogden, also won office in the Uta House.
First national park
Zion National Park in southwestern Utah is the state's oldest and most visited park. It was designated a national monument on July 31, 1909, under a proclamation signed by President William Howard Taft. It was renamed Zion National Monument in 1918 and became a national park a year later. The first automobile road was constructed into the canyon in 1917, and the first lodge was built in 1925 but was destroyed by fire in 1966.
First dinosaurs
The first dinosaurs in Utah were discovered at a quarry site in the Uintah Basin, now known as Dinosaur National Monument, in August 1909. Earl Douglas, a paleontologist from the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, found vertebrae from the tail of a brontosaurus, now renamed apatosaurus. The bones were part of one of the few complete apatosaurus skeletons ever found. The quarry site became a national monument in 1919.
First skiing
The first people who skied in Utah were trappers, miners and mountain dwellers who needed skis to get around. Skis were sometimes called Norwegian snowshoes because Norwegian immigrants first brought skis to the United States. In 1912, the Wasatch Mountain Club was the first organized touring group that skied for recreation to explore Utah's mountains. Alf Engen, a native of Norway who settled in Utah in 1948, is credited with developing the technique of powder skiing in the Wasatch Mountains.
First Olympian
Utah's first Olympian was Alma Wilford Richards from Parowan. He set a record and won a gold medal in the running high jump at the fifth Olympics in Stockholm in 1912. He competed against 56 high-jump contestants from 20 countries, including the famous American athlete Jim Thorpe. Richards cleared a 6-foot, 4-inch bar in front of 22,000 spectators.
First radio station
The first radio station between the Missouri River and the Pacific Coast was established in 1922 by the Deseret News as station KZN. It broadcast from a tin shack atop the six-story red sandstone Deseret News Building, built 20 years earlier. The station later became KSL. The first radio station licensed to an educational institution was established three years earlier as KFOO at the LDS University.
First television system
Utahn Philo T. Farnsworth first patented and produced an operational, all-electronic television system. He drew an "image dissector" for his teacher in 1922 and first demonstrated his invention on Sept. 7, 1927. In addition, he contributed to the development of radar, electron microscopes, incubators for newborn infants and guidance systems for aircraft.
First official to travel in space
Jake Garn, a U.S. senator from 1974 to 1992, and a former mayor of Salt Lake City, became the first public official to travel in space when he flew on the space shuttle Discovery as a payload specialist in April 1985. He performed medical tests during the seven-day flight and orbited the Earth 109 times before landing at Cape Canaveral on April 19.